How to sell T-shirts on Amazon


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The easiest way for creators to sell T-shirts on Amazon is to use Merch.Amazon.com. In this article, I show you how easy it can be to get started selling T-shirts on Amazon, including:

I’ve sold shirts on Amazon for a couple of years and add new shirts when ideas come to mind. Usually, mine are one-liners with snarky comments like these:

I'm prettier in the Metaverse tshirt

lorem ipsum shirt

dont leave me a voicemail tshirt

Selling T-shirts on Amazon – the setup

To get started, head to merch.amazon.com and apply for an account.

Once approved, you can pick several products for your designs like:

  • T-shirts
  • Hoodies
  • Sock pockets
  • Tank tops
  • Throw pillows

There’s a limit on how many items you can submit per day, so simply uncheck some submissions when you can’t upload anything and it’s your first upload for the day.

Read next: What are some great examples of company swag?

Selling T-shirts on Amazon in different countries

You can submit one product per day and have a certain number of submissions available to you. Products can be published on Amazon in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and France. Not all products are available for all countries.

Selling T-shirts on Amazon in different countries

This is where the interface gets tricky. You can only submit one per day, but a bunch of products are checked by default. So go into “select products” and uncheck all but one.

The publish button is greyed out until the unchecking has happened. Once you click to publish, the product is submitted.

Read next: How to sell a podcast

How to design your Amazon merch

Indeed, many design programs and a good designer will do the trick.

Be sure you know the specific dimensions for the particular product you want. For example, for a T-shirt, that would be 4500×5400 pixels.

I use Canva – the pro version (~$12/month) – to do simple designs on their web-based platform. I’m not a designer by trade, but Canva helps me do some design myself.

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Pick the right size and then design your T-shirt design. To sell it in different colors, I would recommend no background and saving it as a png with transparent background. For example, the plan for this “common sense” T-shirt looks like this.

example of tshirt design to sell on Amazon

 

Once uploaded to Amazon, I can sell it in various colors.

Common Sense tshirt in various colors on Amazon

 

Read next: How to participate in the Amazon Live Streaming Platform

You can also download an app now to design your T-shirts.

designing t-shirts with an app

Alternatively, you can also hire a freelance designer. 

Amazon merch revenue

How much money would you make on a $19.99 T-shirt? Just under $5 is the royalty Amazon currently pays. As of Jan. 3, 2023, these are some of the royalty breakdowns for your sales on Amazon.

Amazon Merch royalty breakdowns

But following my process above, the production cost is also relatively low, though there’s some time involved.


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